


take one

by boychik



Category: Hatoful Kareshi | Hatoful Boyfriend
Genre: Gen, Paralysis, sadfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-29
Updated: 2015-01-29
Packaged: 2018-03-08 11:10:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3207014
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boychik/pseuds/boychik
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ryuuji is dying.</p>
            </blockquote>





	take one

**Author's Note:**

> a first draft.

The hospital is the polar opposite of the island.

Like the lab, everything living is neatly contained in known quantities. Be it in petri dishes or lab coats or glass jars with tiny Latin labels, the concept is the same.

The nurse is kind but discreet. She wears a mask and gloves and appraises Ryuuji without fear.

It’s strange to have a woman undressing him in such a civil manner, her touch not cold but clinical still. He cannot even shiver at the professional, carefully measured increments of her feathers brushing his as she helps him in and out of the hospital gown, cleans his beak, his eyes, even his cloaca with a dispassionate, cheerful manner.

Ryuuji is not normally one to be fazed by such things, but the nurse’s tone is cheery and weary all wrapped up in one professional package. (She is a songbird and her voice carries a hint of her ancestor’s warbling, but it is just a trace in the otherwise assimilated hospital-professional complex.) It’s not her by-the-book insistence on the royal we that gets him, but the complacency. It’s her tone suggesting that nobirdie could surprise her, like she’s long ago committed to the idea that she will not receive a response, like she’s certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that Ryuuji will never talk again. More than bothering him, it disturbs him.

Her hopelessness is clear, crushing, but in spite of what it stirs in him, this automatic desire to prove her wrong, he wonders if there’s even a point. What if he tries and tries and still can’t move a muscle. Then she’d be both pessimistic and right.

She takes his pulse and its green electronic cousins are displayed on the wide black monitor by the bed. Ryuuji lays there—he can do nothing but lay, after all—and listens to the beats, the blips, each one counting down in a toneless memory the pumps of his heart till the end.

\---

The doctors don’t know what did it, but they know it was bad.

What they do know is this: Dr Kawara Ryuuji was cataloguing and classifying the flora and fauna on a remote island off the coast of Japan when he contracted a mysterious disease from one of the unknown lifeforms on the island.

His research assistant radioed the nearest hospital for help. Within the hour, Dr Kawara was airlifted from the island back to a hospital in the mainland.

The island was lush, beautiful, overflowing with mystery—and deadly. Ryuuji’s disease has paralyzed him within twenty-four hours. There is little to no hope of his recovery.

\---

Isa came with him in the airlift, stayed by his side. _Refused to leave_ , the doctors and nurses whispered, words blunted by their wings at their beaks. But it wasn’t too unusual that best friends or lovers would wail and cry or else stoically refuse to leave their loved one’s side, refusing food, water, and sleep. Later, the doctors and nurses looked surprised when Mrs Kawara showed up with little Ryouta in tow.

“It’s total paralysis.” Isa looks so calm as he says this. Too calm. He tilts his head a few degrees to the side as he slips his cool, slim feathers over Ryuuji’s and grasps Ryuuji’s wing in his. “Isn’t it, sir.”

Ryuuji can’t feel a thing.

He wants to badly to feel something, anything. To think it made him uncomfortable back in the lab, less than a week ago, for god’s sake, when Isa gently touched him and it sent electricity up his spine and out the top of his head.

The bottom of Isa’s mouth is trembling now, Ryuuji can see that now. Isa’s trying to hold it in, swallow any hint of emotion, but his best efforts are nothing compared to the rigid cask Ryuuji’s bones have frozen into.

Now that Ryuuji can’t move, he’s become very perceptive to the slightest of movements. The slightest shift in emotions is suddenly obvious. It feels almost unreal to watch everybirdie move so subletly, so easily. None of his own efforts yield so much as a twitch.

That’s life on earth.

\---

It’s like pulling the curtain back to the past. Seeing Ryuuji like this, paralyzed and helpless, has certain memories roughly force their way to the forefront of Isa’s brain.

His name was Utsuro Ichijou, and he was paralyzed in the hospital when he was three years old.

Red and gray, red and gray, so much red and gray he forgot that other colors existed.

The whole side of his right body was frozen for four months. An entire season, gone while he lay inside the clean white walls of the hospital.

Over time, though, with repeated tests, the paralysis melted away little by little until he was almost normal again. The functioning on his right side was weak, but he could disguise it if he didn’t have to move too much.

He imagines lying back again in that hospital bed, burned so badly the bandages couldn’t even disguise all the damage. Blood clotting at his temples, the bandages dyed a bright red and sticking disgustingly. The nurses pulled them off as gingerly as they could, but it still hurt. Twenty-four hours a day he lay there, smelling only antiseptic, feeling only the gauze wrapped round his face. Talking only to the doctor and nurses. There was no one to visit him.

But Ryuuji wasn’t even hurt by his enemies throwing a bomb into his parent’s place. Ryuuji was hurt by—by a plant.

And instead of that slow, almost sunny melting of the paralysis that Isa was so lucky to have—I mean, he could have died in there, and the damage to his body was nothing compared to the damage on his psyche, it’s not like he doesn’t know he’s fucked up in the head, that other birds don’t think like he does—Dr Kawara’s illness is fated by tests and charts. He is going to die, restricted and rotted by a goddamned plant. Science opened the door, and now it is sealing his doom.

Isa feels a wave of guilt wash over him. He knows it’s unwarranted, it’s shit, it’s only going to hold him back. But he feels it nonetheless, a guilt starting at the heart and working its way deep into his bones. He buries it down there, under a façade of rationality thicker than flesh and blood. It will grow so slowly he’ll die before he’ll even notice it’s there.

\---

Mrs Kawara can’t help but fall into a silent gasp when she sees her husband, her mouth falling in shock and one wing travelling automatically to cover her expression. Her other wing is clasped across her belly. Inside her body is an egg swollen with a growing baby, Ryouta’s future brother.

Gone is the exuberant Ryuuji she knew, and replaced with this barely breathing carbon copy of her husband. She’s never seen him take a day off work, never even seen him sick save a relatively mild bout of the avian flu over one winter holiday.

 _Like a living corpse_ , she thinks, and hates herself for it. But Mrs Kawara is wrong. It isn’t that at all. Ryuuji can think, and sense, and feel. He’s just trapped inside his mind.

 _Never again will he laugh with me. Sit down for dinner. Go to the lab. Write a report. Play with our son._ Mrs Kawara squeezes her eyes shut. Behind her eyelids she sees an older Ryuuji, feathers shot through with silver. The Ryuuji she will never meet. The Ryuuji Ryouta will never meet.

She can’t stop herself. A hot tear oozes past her beak. She tries to turn away subtly, hide it from Ryouta and Ryuuji, but she’s shaking and besides, her son has already seen.

Mrs Kawara was afraid that her son would see her crying and be upset. That’s the last thing she wanted—she wanted so badly to be strong and resolute in the face of adversity, to show Ryouta and Ryuuji that _we can overcome this as a family_. But she’s read the diagnoses. Four different tests, four identical results. Their family was going to end so much more swiftly than anticipated. It wasn’t fair that the universe has ripped him from me so soon, she wanted to scream until her throat was raw. From us. How could he die like he’s no one, like he’s nothing?

But at the sight of his mother’s tears, Ryouta gently made his way to her side and hugged her as tightly as he could. A knot in his throat prevented him from saying anything, and he was glad—the “it’s okay” stuck halfway between lungs and mouth was a lie, anyway.

“I know it’s inevitable,” his mother said, her arms around him. “Ryouta, I know that everybirdie dies. We have to. But your father’s so young—” Her voice broke, and he could feel her trembling. “There was no expectation it would go this way. Zero.”

Ryouta lifted his eyes to the hospital ceiling. Cold and gray, gray and flat. Ruled into perfect lines and speckled with tiny flecks like the shell of an egg.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered into his neck. “He was—I know he—I’m sorry,” and she’s crying again, ragged and uncontrolled.

That’s life on earth, Mrs Kawara. We’ll never be rational, no matter how long we live or how hard we try.

\---

Ryuuji can feel himself getting weaker by the day. The nurses have given him oxygen to make his breathing easier and his vision clearer. He finds himself thinking, truly stressed for the first time in a long time. When he was at work—it sounds like a fantasy, a collegiate pipe dream, but he was pretty much always happy. He loved his work, because he could discover the truth in shards, offer up those glimpses to the world for inspection. But why now, when he has so much left to give? He knows he can’t control life and death, and he needs to make peace with death and his place in the world, and that he has given as much as he can, and that he has had a better life than he has a right to expect. But why, why, why is it that it has turned out this way in the end?

The night has come, the visitors have left, the hospital has quieted save the near-silent steps of the night-shift nurses. There’s nothing to do but lay in bed and look at the light of the full moon streaming through the windows.

His body is nothing more than a cage. He is trapped inside his mind, but at night in the quiet time his panic has started to subside. Every little bit of external beauty is a relief, a reminder of the amazing world around him.

How many mysteries there are to explore and unlock and understand and reveal. His first thought is of what he could do if he was granted life for ten more years, twenty, even the impossible, one hundred years or one thousand. The second thought—much more alarming? crushing? inspiring? Ryuuji isn’t quite sure—is what there is to do. How much he has done seems so small swallowed up by vast oceans of ignorance and mystery.

Surely the entire race would perish before anyone would ford that ocean.

The last thing he sees before he closes his eyes is the moon, round and full-bellied. A mystery unlocked, but even more beautiful than when it was an entity unknown.

Images float through his mind, images of the places he has gone and the birds he has met. Of his wife, of Isa, of Ryouta.

Their smiles, their laughter. Their serious faces leaning over him in the ward.

Ryuuji is content to see them. He knows it won’t be the last time.

Outside the window, the stars look like suspended snow.

He closes his eyes.

\---

It’s two in the morning when Ryuuji’s wife wakes up, her feathers covered in sweat and blood.

She rushes to the bathroom, feet scrabbling at the floor, a frenetic mantra of _No no no no no let it not be so_ beating a methodical rhythm in her brain like a neverending mandalaic tunnel.

But the world has no concern for Mrs Kawara’s desires any more than it does Ryuuji’s desires, or Isa’s, or Ryouta’s, or any bird on the planet’s for that matter.

The egg lies broken on the bathroom floor.

She knows then: Ryuuji is dead.

She stumbles back toward her room, but her feet lead her to Ryouta’s room instead. She passes her wing once, twice, over Ryouta’s forehead, stroking it so gently than he can’t feel a thing, so he won’t wake up. My angel, she whispers in the tiniest of voices. My baby, less than a week he was with me, Ryouta, Ryouta you’re the only one left—

Her son does not wake, but sleeps on soundly.

The full moon casts its light through the open window, soft on Ryouta’s face. The gentle wind can do nothing to carry Mrs Kawara’s prayers out into the world. They are directionless, and they spill across the room, going nowhere and doing nothing to quell the sorrow that like a bottomless pit has infested her mind and heart.

 


End file.
